On July 20th, 1969 man first set foot on the moon with the Apollo 11 mission, or so they say. If it was faked, or so the theory goes, one would think that there were a few details that don’t quite add up. One such theory is that the hatch on the lunar module isn’t actually large enough to allow a fully-suited up astronaut to enter and exit the module.

The Arduino-powered device aims the laser, and transmits this information to a tablet that also provides a convenient user interface. This data was then arranged as a point cloud, proving that… You can take a guess, or watch the video below to see his conclusion!

I used the Garmin LIDAR-Lite V3 along with a couple of metal geared servo motors to build a simple pan/tilt scanner, which pairs via Bluetooth to an Android app I built using MIT App Inventor 2 to control and receive data from the Arduino. It’s simple but effective. Although every tutorial I read suggested I couldn’t safely pull the voltage off the board for the motors, but I found that the vin pin gave me no problems, as long as I used a 5V 1.5A linear voltage regulator between the pin and the motors. I supplied 9V using AA batteries to the power jack on the Arduino. In the future I may upgrade the scanner by adding a small camera to grab RGB data for each point as it samples, and ideally I would change the whole thing to use a stepper motor for continuous spinning and scanning to generate a denser cloud.

Water normally falls from the sky to the ground, the time fountain from hacker isaac879 appears to work much differently. As shown in the video below, water droplets somehow levitate from a circular orange apparatus to a blue one on top.

The trick here is that the water isn’t actually falling up, but appears that way by carefully controlling the flashing of RGB lights using an Arduino Uno. If the lights flash at the same rate as the water drops, they appear to stand still, while if the light is flashed more slowly, they appear to rise.

This is the prototype RGB LED Time Fountain I designed and built. It uses RGB LED strip lights to strobe a stream of water drops to make them appear as if they are levitating. By strobing the different colors out of phase with each other some incredible effects can be created.

An Arduino Uno controls the timing of the RGB strobe and the PWM of the pump. Bluetooth communication was achieved using an HC-05 Bluetooth module and the “Arduino bluetooth controller” app by “Giumig Apps.”

Be sure to check out the video to see it in action, especially the bit around 3:40 where drops appear to rise out of a cup while it’s getting filled with water.

After discovering capacitive touch interactions with a Makey Makey device and an Arduino Leonardo, Jason Eldred realized it could also be used to control the Unity game engine. After a night of hacking, he had a basic interface that could change the scale of a virtual circle. From there, he teamed up with Alex L. Bennett to produce an art installation called Bee that invited users to interact with it by physically touching a panel to change graphics on the panel itself and a screen in front of them.

While not meant as a game per se, after more experimentation including work by Gabe Miller and Dustin Williams, this interactive display method was finally turned into a virtual air hockey table via a giant crisscrossing grid of copper tape and wires.

Maker “cool austin” is a fan of water speakers, which pulse jets of water inside plastic enclosures to the beat of your music, but thought they could be improved.

What he came up with is a multi-tower setup that not only dances with light and water to the beat of the music playing, but splits up the pulses into frequencies a la a VU meter.

The project uses an Arduino Mega—chosen because it has sufficient PWM outputs to control the water and lights in five of these enclosures via MOSFETs—to output signals to the water units for an excellent audio-visual display.

Water speakers from the store are great to watch, but I felt they could do more. So many years ago I had modified a set to show the frequency of music playing. At the time I used the Color Organ Triple Deluxe II, combined with a set of photocells potentiometers and transistors I was able to get a set of 3 speakers to function.

I then a few years ago had heard about the IC MSGEQ7 which has the ability to separate audio into 7 data values for an Arduino to read. I utilize an Arduino mega 2560 in this project because it has the required number of PWM pins to drive five water towers.

While the Nintendo Wii has been on the market for well over 10 years, its controllers continue to provide a variety of tools for hacking. One component you may want to consider for your next hack is the camera from the Wii Remote, which senses the position of nearby infrared light spots and outputs them as X/Y coordinates via I²C.

While that may instantly set off multiple use ideas, if you need inspiration, be sure to check out this setup by Jack Carter. He mounted one of these cameras to the top of a computer screen, and uses it to track an IR LED mounted to the top of his headset.

From there, an Arduino Uno translates this information as joystick inputs to the computer, which is then configured to control an in-game camera as seen in the video here.

If you think Furbies have become extinct, think again, as musical hacker “Look Mum No Computer” has decided to revive a number of them to create his own Furby Organ.

To make this horrifying yet awesome instrument, he placed 44—yes, 44—of these strange creatures on top of an organ frame with a keyboard and several dials, along with a switch labeled ominously as “collective awakening.”

Each individual Furby is controlled by two Arduino Nano boards, and as you might imagine, the whole project took a massive amount of work to wire things together. You can see the incredible results in the first video below, while the second gives a bit more background on the device’s origin.

While he opted to construct it in a 1:2 scale, it’s still an impressive physical build, looking comically large, but not entirely unwieldy as a full-sized 8-foot blaster would have been.

Inside, sound and lighting effects are controlled by an Arduino, which plays clips from the show and flashes in different patterns via an Adafruit sound board and RGB LED strip.

I wanted the blaster to play sounds and have lights come out of the barrel so I rigged up an Arduino Nano with an Adafruit sound board and amp that would cycle blaster sounds and lights when a button was pressed. And because there’s always more than meets the eye, I had a separate button that played just Transformers sound clips. To defuse the LED strip when the lights fired, I printed a semi-translucent disc that would stand-off from the sides so that sound could still escape, but the light would be diffused. I decided to mount all of the audio components in the barrel so that the cannon could be taken apart to charge the battery back.

When adding water to one or both glasses, the radio turns on. Channels can then be changed by transferring water from one container to the other, and fine-tuned by touching the outside of the glass. Volume can even be adjusted by poking a finger into the water itself.

An Arduino Leonardo is used to pick up capacitive signals, and data is then sent a computer where a machine learning program called Wekinator decodes user interactions.

Pour Reception is a playful radio that strives to challenge our cultural understanding of what an interface is and can be. By using capacitive sensing and machine learning, two glasses of water are turned into a digital material for the user to explore and appropriate.

The technology of Pour Reception is based on capacitive sensing that can turn any conductive material into a sensor. While there is several methods for creating a capacitive sensor with Arduino, we have used the Tact library by NANDStudio to create a capacitive sensor which are capable of making readings with rich details.

Using these data readings together with Wekinator, it is possible to classify various gestures when interacting with the glasses, and furthermore, map those gestures into commands for controlling the radio.

As part of his master’s studies at Eindhoven University, Felix Ros created a haptic interface that uses a five-bar linkage system to not only take input from one’s finger, but also act as a feedback device via a pair of rotary outputs.

Designed for autonomous cars, “Scribble” lets a driver draw their way through traffic. They decide the path and the vehicle then follows, not letting them drive but pilot the car.

Scribble is powered by an Arduino Due that communicates with a computer, running software written in openFrameworks.

This drawing based interaction is not driving nor being chauffeured around, it is something in the middle. It leverages the human ability to draw and read visual representations; in this case in the form of a line representing location at a given time. This easy interaction is therefore scalable with the level of automation, an increased level of automation means less interaction is necessary since the system can handle more complex situations.

Rather than driving, Scribble requires the driver to plan his move ahead in time. If successful, this can work quite relaxing since the driver can plan first and after focus on something else, until further planning is required. As described by a test user: “Normally you have to think twice, now only once,” meaning that he does not have to actually execute his planned action since the car will do this for him, so in the meantime he can “… sit back and relax.” Interacting with semi-autonomous systems is like a fluid human-machine dance, it are interfaces like these that could potentially teach us how to become better dancers.

Arduino boards by themselves are, of course, great for making a wide array of projects. Sometimes, however, you’ll need to add other integrated circuits (ICs) for extra functionality. If you want to be absolutely sure that the IC you’re using in your project is working correctly, this tester by Akshay Baweja will input the signals to the device, and analyze the outputs that it produces on a 2.4” touchscreen.

While this type of equipment would normally be quite expensive, Baweja’s Arduino Mega-powered gadget can be built for around $25 in the form of a shield. His custom PCB includes a 20-pin ZIF socket and a 2.4″ TFT touchscreen with an integrated micro SD slot.